LTE over Citizen Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) just got real

The move towards commercial deployment of LTE on Citizen Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) wireless spectrum ecosystem in the US has taken a major step forward with the successful test of 4G LTE technology over CBRS in Verizon’s live commercial network. Ericsson partnered with Verizon, Qualcomm and Federated Wireless to make it happen.

The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has approved the 3.5GHz CBRS band for LTE use to improve wireless broadband access and performance in the US. Comprising 150 MHz of 3.5 GHz shared spectrum, the CBRS band has primarily been used by the federal government for radar systems.

The FCC decision means the band has been approved for shared use with wireless small cells. The shared spectrum approach is seen as key to meeting service providers’ network capacity challenges as data demands increase.

Describing the Florida test, which comprised both in-building and outdoor systems, as marking the beginning of commercial deployment of LTE on CBRS spectrum, Verizon said devices that can access the CBRS spectrum are expected in 2018.

ABOUT THE TEST

Ericsson provided Ericsson Radio DOT system for indoor and Radio 2208 for outdoor for the test

The deployment in Florida used a combination of Verizon licensed AWS and 700 MHz spectrum aggregated with 50 MHz of CBRS band 48 spectrum. The combination of these LTE Advanced features of multiple antennas, 256 QAM, and carrier aggregation across shared and licensed spectrum produced peak speeds of 790 Mbps

Federated Wireless provided the prioritization through their Spectrum Controller, a Spectrum Access System (SAS) that dynamically allocates channels within the FCC’s spectrum sharing framework for this band

Ericsson also provided the domain proxy to enable the radios to communicate with the Federated Wireless Spectrum Controller.